Oil Powers, by Victor McFarland (introduction)

OIL POWERS

A History of the U.S.–Saudi Alliance

VICTOR McFARLAND

INTRODUCTION Jeddah, 1974

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n the summer of 1974, Jeddah hummed with activity. Despite the blistering heat, the port city on Saudi Arabia’s west coast swarmed with cranes and bulldozers working around the clock. Jeddah was expanding in all directions, fueled by a tremendous economic boom. Just months before, the price of oil had soared as the Arab petroleum-exporting states cut production and imposed a temporary embargo on the United States.

With the embargo now over and the kingdom’s oil revenues skyrocketing, money and goods were pouring in from all over the world. A line of cargo ships extended far out into the Red Sea waiting to dock at Jeddah’s hopelessly overcrowded port.

Oil brought new wealth to Saudi Arabia. It also attracted the attention of the United States. On June 14, 1974, a giant fleet of American aircraft descended onto Jeddah’s airport. President Richard Nixon arrived in Air Force One, accompanied by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and dozens of aides, Secret Ser vice guards, and support staff. A separate transport hauled Nixon’s custom armored limousines. Two chartered airliners brought 122 photographers and journalists, including some of the most famous names in American news: Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Connie Chung. It was the first time a U.S. president had ever visited Saudi Arabia, and the

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U.S. embassy in Jeddah was astonished by the sight. The State Department official Hume Horan marveled at the presidential fleet: “There were maybe 500 in his delegation and 20 aircraft from the U.S. government there on the hard top, a sort of U.S. pilgrimage to Arabia! We thought the Peninsula might slip below the Red Sea under the weight of this American armada!”1 Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal met Nixon on the tarmac. They walked past the Saudi honor guard as the evening sun glinted off the swords and goldembroidered uniforms of the soldiers, before boarding a motorcade headed to a nearby royal palace. Just months before, Faisal had led the oil embargo against the United States. Now, both men were determined to put that episode behind them. They shook hands for the cameras and spoke glowingly about their “constructive and fruitful cooperation” and the long “unbroken friendship” between their two nations (figure 0.1).2

Richard Nixon and King Faisal, Riyadh, June 1974. To the left is Crown Prince Khalid. To the right is famed U.S. State Department interpreter Isa Sabbagh. In the crowd behind them are prominent U.S. and Saudi officials, including secretary of state Henry Kissinger, deputy national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and ambassador James Akins, along with the princes Abdullah, Fahd, and Sultan. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration.

F I G U R E 0 .1

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Nixon and Faisal put the final stamp on work that had already been done earlier that month by Kissinger and Prince Fahd, third in line for the Saudi throne. The secretary of state and the prince concluded a pair of landmark deals that accelerated U.S.-Saudi economic and military cooperation. They were delighted to see their initiative confirmed by their nation’s leaders. As Nixon and Faisal shook hands, Kissinger and Fahd stood behind them, grinning.

Nixon and Faisal would soon be out of power. Facing certain impeachment, Nixon resigned from office just two months after his meeting with Faisal. The Saudi king was assassinated by one of his relatives less than a year later, in March 1975. Their legacy, however, would endure. During the following years, Saudi and American leaders consolidated their alliance.

Saudi Arabia invested billions of dollars in U.S. financial markets, bought huge quantities of American goods, and promised to keep oil prices down.

The United States sold the kingdom advanced weapons, provided technical expertise, educated the children of the Saudi elite, and pledged to protect Saudi Arabia from its enemies. Their alliance reshaped the Middle East and left a lasting mark on both nations. This book is the story of how that alliance was built.

*** The first step in understanding the U.S.-Saudi alliance is admitting that it exists. U.S. and Saudi leaders have always been careful to deny that they have an alliance, insisting that it is merely a “security partnership” or a “special relationship.”3 Technically, they are right. The United States and Saudi Arabia do not have a formal treaty agreement to defend each other from attack, like the one between the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

By any commonsense definition, though, the United States and Saudi Arabia are obviously allies. For decades, it has been clear that the United States would protect Saudi Arabia—including, if necessary, by force. That commitment was proven in the 1990–91 Gulf War, when the United States sent more than half a million troops to defend the kingdom from Iraq. The United States has armed and trained the Saudi military, refueled Saudi 3

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aircraft, and provided data that guided Saudi military strikes against adversaries from Iran in the 1980s to the Houthi rebels in Yemen after 2015.

Saudi Arabia has shared intelligence with the U.S. military, hosted thousands of American troops, and helped the United States launch two invasions of Iraq from Saudi soil. If that is not an alliance, then what is?

U.S. policymakers have chosen to avoid the domestic backlash and public oversight that would come with a formal treaty relationship. Treaties with foreign powers must be ratified by the Senate, but Congress—and the American people—have often been skeptical of close U.S.-Saudi relations.4 Riyadh, too, has hidden the extent of its alliance with Washington. In 1979, the Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal was asked about his country’s military cooperation with the United States. He flatly denied that an alliance existed. “We do not enter into alliances [ahlaf],” Saud al-Faisal said, except with other Arab and Muslim countries.5 Such dissembling came at a cost. When Saudi Arabia asked the United States to intervene in the Gulf War, half a million U.S. troops suddenly arrived in the kingdom. The Saudi people had never been informed that their nation depended so completely on U.S. military protection. That realization infuriated the regime’s critics, including Osama bin Laden, and planted the seeds of future conflict.

U.S. and Saudi elites obscured their alliance because they feared opposition from their own people. As early as the 1940s, many Americans saw the Saudi regime as too backward, bigoted, and despotic to be an American ally. Arab nationalists in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region denounced the kingdom for betraying its fellow Arabs and partnering with Israel’s chief patron. Religious conservatives feared that their nation was being contaminated and secularized by American influence. And leftist Saudis accused the U.S. government and the oil company Aramco of plundering the nation’s wealth and propping up the authoritarian Saudi regime.

During Nixon’s visit, the royal family deflected such criticism by emphasizing its nationalist credentials. The government-linked newspaper Al-Riyadh reminded its readers that Faisal had led the embargo against the United States just a few months earlier. “We started the oil war,” Al-Riyadh declared, “to restore an uprooted people”—the Palestinians—to their homes.

Until Jerusalem was returned to its rightful inhabitants, Al-Riyadh vowed, “we will not back down.” Faisal himself warned there would be no peace in 4

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the region until Israel restored the rights of the Palestinians and withdrew from the Arab territory it had seized in 1967.6 The Saudi government worried that such reminders might not be enough to quiet public opposition. The regime’s security forces kept spectators away from Nixon’s motorcade route. American journalists noticed that soldiers and police outnumbered ordinary civilians along the roadway. Despite Faisal’s loudly proclaimed sympathy for the Palestinian cause, his regime could be much less sympathetic to actual Palestinians. The security forces tracked down and questioned all Palestinian immigrants in the area, in case they posed a threat to Faisal and his American visitors.7 The U.S. delegation was unsure what sort of welcome they could expect from Saudis outside the royal palaces. The administration gave them private instructions not to stray beyond approved parts of Jeddah. The Americans were to watch what they said to local citizens, and under no circumstances mention that after they left Saudi Arabia, they were scheduled to visit Israel.8 Back at home, not all Americans were pleased to see Nixon currying favor with Saudi Arabia, either. Many, including some leading members of Congress, had not forgotten that Faisal had declared an oil embargo against the United States less than one year earlier.9 In the face of such opposition, U.S. and Saudi leaders maintained their alliance by shielding it from public scrutiny and accountability.

*** When U.S. and Saudi leaders did admit they had an unusually close relationship, they often claimed they had no choice in the matter. They described the ties between Washington and Riyadh as the inevitable consequence of basic geological and economic facts. They argued that Saudi Arabia had oil, and the United States needed it, so they were forced to work together despite their political and cultural differences. In October 1974, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar interviewed Prince Fahd. By that point, the oil embargo had been over for seven months, and U.S.-Saudi economic cooperation was expanding rapidly. Why, Al-Anwar asked, was Saudi Arabia working so closely with the United States, investing its oil earnings in American markets and buying American goods rather than sharing the 5

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money with its Arab brothers? Fahd dismissed the question. It was “only natural” (min al-tabiʿi), he said, that Washington and Riyadh should have a close relationship, since “the United States is the largest oil consumer and Saudi Arabia is the largest producer” in the world.10 U.S. officials stressed similar themes, pointing to Saudi Arabia’s importance as an oil producer. Even when they claimed to be uncomfortable with the relationship, they argued that it was locked into place by circumstances outside their control and decisions made by their predecessors. In 1963, during a proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Faisal asked the United States to send an air force squadron to defend the kingdom against Egyptian bombing raids. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were reluctant to step into the middle of an Egyptian-Saudi conflict. The national security adviser McGeorge Bundy admonished them: “I gather the Chiefs also wonder whether this flea-bitten part of the world is one where we should get involved. I’m afraid we are involved here long since—even though it may have been a mistake in the first place. But remember oil.”11 At that time, the United States had dominated the global oil industry for more than a century. American petroleum made the United States into the prototype of a high-energy, motorized society and fueled Allied victory in both world wars. The lavish use of oil, in machines from air force jets to presidential limousines and the big cars of ordinary consumers, epitomized American power. Most of the largest oil companies in the world—including the owners of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), the consortium that ran Saudi Arabia’s oil fields— were American-owned. The United States still produced most of the oil it needed from its own domestic sources. It even had surplus production capacity that it could tap in an emergency.

During the early 1970s, that surplus disappeared. The United States became increasingly dependent on imports. Simultaneously, the balance of power in the whole global oil market shifted as Saudi Arabia and the other producers took more control over their own resources and demanded higher prices for their oil. That transformation was underscored by the oil crisis of 1973–74, when U.S. consumers waited in long lines for scarce gasoline.

It was a traumatic experience for Americans who believed that giving up their energy self-sufficiency meant losing national sovereignty and global 6

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influence. Saudi Arabia, it seemed, had replaced the United States as the world’s leading oil power.12 All three presidents of the 1970s—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—spent the decade promoting various ideas for regaining “energy independence.” In practice, though, they recognized that their plans offered no panacea. The alliance with Saudi Arabia offered an alternative way of ensuring the continued supply of petroleum even as U.S. production dwindled. Nixon alluded to that concern— and the fact that oil had become so expensive—at his dinner with Faisal in 1974, when he joked that Air Force One would need Saudi fuel to make it to its next stop. “Your Majesty,” Nixon said, “I just want to make clear, we, of course, will pay the world price.”13

*** It would be a mistake, however, to assume that America’s need for Saudi oil made the U.S.-Saudi alliance inevitable. When American leaders pursued closer ties with Saudi Arabia, disregarding concerns about democracy, human rights, and religious freedom, they claimed to be motivated by a clear-eyed view of the facts. Those facts sometimes turned out to be mistaken. Exaggerated fears of oil scarcity were a powerful influence on U.S. energy policy in the 1970s. Many U.S. officials worried that global oil supplies were quickly running out, leaving Saudi Arabia as the one remaining country that still had large reserves to spare. The pessimistic forecasts were incorrect, and oil prices would plunge during the 1980s as a supply glut overwhelmed demand.14 Advocates of the U.S.-Saudi alliance also overstated the risk that the United States would lose access to Saudi oil if it did not back the Saudi regime. They overestimated Saudi Arabia’s ability, and desire, to stop producing oil if U.S. leaders failed to heed Saudi wishes.15 Hawkish officials conjured up dangers, like a Soviet move into the Persian Gulf after the 1979 occupation of Afghanistan, which never materialized. And they constantly fretted about the survival of the Saudi monarchy, which proved far more durable than most outside observers predicted. This is not to suggest that such fears were never real; only that they rested on a debatable reading of 7

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the evidence, one that U.S. and Saudi elites used to reinforce their own policy preferences.

Even the role of Saudi oil was more complicated than it first appeared.

Other countries like Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, Baathist Iraq, and the Soviet Union also controlled large oil reserves, but none of them enjoyed anything like Saudi Arabia’s privileged relationship with the United States.

U.S. leaders believed that Saudi oil was more valuable than Libyan, Iraqi, or Soviet oil not only because there was so much of it, but also because they believed that Saudi Arabia wanted to help the United States.

Saudi Arabia was remarkably successful at persuading American leaders that it was the most responsible member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The Saudi regime argued that among the world’s leading oil producers, it alone was willing to limit oil price increases, foregoing short-term profits to help the global economy and protect the anticommunist world. Those Saudi claims were questionable, but they found a ready audience among American policymakers, who were dismayed by the rapid increase in oil prices during the 1970s and desperately wanted an ally inside OPEC.16 U.S. leaders also approved of the way Saudi Arabia spent its oil revenues. When Nixon arrived, Jeddah’s docks were filled with American-made cars, appliances, and other goods. Students from wealthy Saudi families studied at American universities. The Saudi government hired consultants from places like Harvard, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Ford Foundation to oversee the kingdom’s development plans. Saudi demand for the most advanced U.S. fighter jets, tanks, and missiles was so limitless that it dismayed many of the Pentagon’s advisors in the kingdom, who feared that the kingdom could never operate and maintain such an array of equipment. And at the peak of the oil boom in the 1970s, when the money was piling up too fast to spend, Saudi Arabia deposited much of the surplus in U.S. banks.

The opportunities available for American companies were enormous.

They were on full display during Fahd’s visit to Washington, DC in June 1974 when the Saudi embassy threw a gigantic party for Henry Kissinger and 1,400 other guests, including representatives from Chase Manhattan, First National City Bank, Exxon, and Lockheed.17 The royal family often stressed 8

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its commitment to doing business with U.S. corporations. During Nixon’s visit to Jeddah later that month, Crown Prince Khalid told Kissinger that even though the aviation world was abuzz with the news of the supersonic Concorde that Britain and France were developing, Saudi Arabia still preferred to buy American. “Boeing,” he said, “is the best aircraft.”18 Khalid, who suffered from heart trouble, would later order a custom Boeing 747 with the world’s only flying surgical operating room.

Other Saudi funds went to fight Marxism and support allied political forces beyond the kingdom’s borders. Riyadh sent billions of dollars to bolster anticommunist regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere, delighting U.S. officials, even if some money went to groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which the United States viewed less favorably.

The Saudi regime combined its financial resources with the promotion of conservative Wahhabi Islam, which it used as a weapon against its political rivals. Working together, Washington and Riyadh succeeded in pushing Soviet influence out of much of the greater Middle East and permanently weakening the Arab left. The cost included the rise of militant political Islam, long-lasting civil wars, and the crumbling of state authority in countries, like Afghanistan and Yemen, where Saudi Arabia bankrolled violent insurgencies.19

*** The U.S.-Saudi alliance had a profound impact on Saudi Arabia. Revenue from oil production transformed the kingdom. Aramco and other firms like Bechtel built much of the kingdom’s physical infrastructure, including petroleum refineries, highways, railroads, and the electrical grid. With new wealth came better nutrition, hospitals, and schools, and corresponding improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, and other measures of human welfare. Despite Saudi Arabia’s image as an ultra-traditional society, a reputation reinforced by the government’s emphasis on Islamic morality, some aspects of Saudi life gradually liberalized. A few highprofile changes, like the abolition of slavery in the 1960s, were trumpeted by the regime and its defenders as proof of the monarchy’s enlightened leadership.20 9

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One aspect of Saudi life that did not change, however, was the royal family’s political dominance. Many outside observers, including U.S. officials, predicted that eventually the royals would cede much of their power to commoner technocrats. In practice, though, U.S. policy favored the leading members of the Saudi dynasty. American leaders believed that close ties with the royal family offered the best chance for influencing Saudi foreign policy and securing lucrative commercial opportunities. The king and the senior princes used their ties with the U.S. government to enhance their own power, giving them control over enormous arms contracts and other resources. As a result, the royals, and their allies among the business community and other Saudi elites, reaped the biggest rewards from the oil boom of the 1970s. Far less fortunate were dissidents, labor activists, and workers who came from the marginalized Shia community or from overseas.21 U.S. leaders defended their ties with the royal family by pointing to common interests in fighting communism and other enemies. They argued that the Saudi regime was reforming and modernizing the kingdom. And they fell back on old stereotypes about Arab culture, suggesting that autocracy was the natural state of Middle Eastern politics.22 When Fahd visited Washington, DC, in 1974, Nixon told him that the United States had no interest in democratizing the rest of the world. Nixon reassured Fahd that as far as he was concerned, “all countries, as for example Saudi Arabia,” could “maintain their own systems without outside interference from anyone.” When the Saudi foreign minister Omar Saqqaf told Kissinger that many Saudis were impatient to modernize their kingdom, Kissinger cautioned that the royals should move “slowly enough to keep your political structure.”23

*** The U.S.-Saudi alliance changed the United States, too. It encouraged corporate consolidation, the financialization of the economy, and the growth of executive power. Over time, Saudi Arabia became more like the United States, but the United States also became a bit more like Saudi Arabia.24 The largest U.S. corporations made the biggest profits in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi oil production was controlled by just four American companies, the 10

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predecessors of Chevron and ExxonMobil, who had the exclusive right to operate in the main oil-producing region of the kingdom. They enjoyed a privileged relationship not only with the Saudi government, but also with the U.S. government. They shared intelligence with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and coordinated their activities with the State Department and the Pentagon. That status helped shield them from legal oversight at home, leading the Harry Truman administration to veto a criminal antitrust case that could have broken them up into smaller companies.

Even beyond the oil sector, Saudi Arabia was a difficult market for most American firms to enter. It was challenging to transport labor and supplies over thousands of miles, and sometimes even harder to secure the cooperation of the Saudi government. The largest corporations, like Bechtel, Lockheed, and Boeing, had the resources and the political connections to do business in the kingdom. Their smaller rivals could not compete.

The high oil prices of the 1970s created a more volatile and inegalitarian U.S. economy, less dependent on manufacturing and more dependent on finance. U.S. government leaders sought to attract Saudi investment to the United States by promising special exemptions from public and congressional oversight. The secrecy requirements were so strict that even the CIA had to be reprimanded when it published data on Saudi funds. Billions of Saudi “petrodollars” flowed to the U.S. Treasury and the mortgage lender Fannie Mae, foreshadowing the role of foreign capital in financing U.S. deficit spending and the housing bubbles of later decades.25 These arrangements underlined the rise of a new economic environment involving gigantic flows of capital across international borders, with even the world’s most powerful nations competing to attract investment by offering perks, like secrecy and anonymity, once pioneered by small offshore banking hubs.26 During the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia encouraged a dramatic shift in U.S. monetary policy. At that time, the United States was experiencing rapid inflation and the value of the dollar was sliding. Those trends threatened Saudi Arabia because the kingdom had invested billions in the United States, and priced its oil in dollars, so a decline in the dollar threatened both the kingdom’s revenues and its accumulated reserves. Riyadh demanded that the United States reduce inflation and boost the value of the dollar.

In 1978 the Jimmy Car ter administration took a series of painful steps to 11

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defend the dollar, with the Federal Reserve Bank boosting interest rates sharply even though doing so increased the risk of a recession. In 1979, the new Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, adopted an even more extreme approach, sending interest rates soaring and throwing millions of Americans out of work in order to control inflation. That move, too, was preceded by Saudi pressure for the United States to stabilize the value of the dollar.27

*** The clearest Saudi influence on the United States was in the realm of foreign policy. The kingdom pushed a previously skeptical U.S. government to join Saudi anticommunist initiatives in the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and Afghanistan. U.S. leaders valued Saudi cooperation on oil, financial affairs, and regional security so highly that maintaining Saudi confidence in the United States— even if that meant intervening in places where U.S. officials did not agree that any clear national interest was at stake—became an end in itself for American policy makers.

Saudi Arabia’s effort to sway U.S. foreign policy was aided by the kingdom’s especially close relations with the White House and the rest of the executive branch. Congress was more skeptical of the U.S.-Saudi alliance. The Saudi regime was endlessly frustrated by congressional complaints about the kingdom’s human rights record, along with legislative resistance to U.S.-Saudi arms sales and other deals. The royals faced no such constraints on their own power at home and had little patience for legal niceties in Washington, DC. Nixon probably understood their feelings. When he visited Jeddah, the Watergate scandal was entering its final phase, and Nixon was trying desperately to stave off impeachment. His visit to the Middle East was a welcome escape from Washington. There were no special prosecutors or investigative committees in the kingdom, and Nixon must have felt at least a touch of envy for Saudi leaders who never had to deal with a critical press, legislature, or Supreme Court.

The White House played up its ties with the Saudi regime, sometimes sounding as if it was collaborating with Saudi Arabia not only against for12

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eign enemies, but also against the U.S. Congress. Nixon and Kissinger tried to convince the Saudi leaders that if Nixon were removed from office, the kingdom would lose its best friend in the United States. During the 1974 visit, Kissinger told Saqqaf that the administration was under attack “by the Jews” and suggested that Democratic senators who criticized Nixon’s foreign policy were doing so on Israel’s orders.28 Faisal agreed. Implying that Watergate was a Jewish plot, he told Nixon privately that he found it “painful to see all these intrigues against the President and his Secretary of State” just as Nixon and Kissinger were putting pressure on Israel to make peace with its Arab neighbors. “It cannot be coincidental,” Faisal concluded darkly. Speaking to the press later that day, the king declared that “anybody who stands against you, Mr. President,” was an enemy of “tranquility and peace in the world,” and asked Americans “to rally around you, Mr. President.”29 Faisal could not save Nixon from prosecution. He could, however, help the president bypass other kinds of legal oversight. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Congress was trying to reassert its authority over foreign policy. Meeting Faisal in Jeddah, Nixon complained that there were congressional limitations on sending U.S. arms to their mutual friends in Egypt and Pakistan. He suggested that Saudi Arabia take up the task instead, warning Faisal that “this whole subject should be held in strictest confidence.”30 During the following years, Saudi Arabia bankrolled joint covert operations and foreign aid initiatives, contributing to the growing power of the U.S. presidency as it bypassed congressional restrictions on funding.

Saudi Arabia was still the junior partner in the alliance. It could influence U.S. policy, though, because Saudi and American elites thought they shared a set of common interests. U.S. banks wanted a deregulated financial system, economic policy makers like Volcker wanted to tackle inflation, hawkish officials wanted a more aggressive approach toward the Soviet Union, and the White House wanted to limit congressional authority over foreign policy. They all found that Saudi preferences coincided with their own, and saw Saudi influence as a way to advance their agendas.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance entrenched executive and royal power in both countries, enriched big corporations, and pushed both countries to the right.

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It paved the way for a militarized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and decades of armed intervention, including the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq and the post-9/11 “War on Terror.� The ties between Washington and Riyadh had such a profound impact because they were the product of decades of hard political work by leaders on both sides. To understand how they built their alliance, we will turn back to the first Saudi royal visit to the United States in 1943, when Faisal was still a young prince.

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Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States and Saudi Arabia have built a close but often troubled alliance. Connecting foreign relations and domestic politics, Victor McFarland’s critical history challenges the view that the U.S.–Saudi alliance is the inevitable consequence of American energy demand and Saudi Arabia’s huge oil reserves.

Oil Powers reveals the role of the U.S.–Saudi alliance in bolstering the authority of the American presidency and the Saudi royal family, laying the groundwork for American military involvement in the Middle East and entrenchment of a global order fueled by oil.

“The extraordinary relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has influenced both countries, often for the worse. There is no better guide to the origins of this complex alliance than McFarland’s book. Anyone with an interest in the U.S. role in the Middle East should read it.”

Odd Arne We stad , author of The Cold War: A World History “A lot of nonsense has been written since 9/11 about the history of U.S.–Saudi relations.

Oil Powers gets it right.”

Robert Vitalis , author of Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy “McFarland’s superb, deeply researched book convincingly shows just how crucial the U.S.–Saudi alliance was in reorienting America’s foreign policy and the global economy in the 1970s. The legacies of these policies—wars in the Middle East, the rise of finance, and others—continue to shape global affairs today.”

Vane ssa Og le , author of The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 “Erudite and eloquent, Oil Powers is required reading for all those interested in U.S.–Saudi relations, oil politics, and international political economy. McFarland makes a stirring argument for Saudi influence on the financialization and militarization of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the 1970s.”

Christopher R . W. Die trich , author of Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization

Victor McFar l and is assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri.

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